Biology

Biology is the scientific study of life.
[1][2][3] It is a natural science with a broad scope but

has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field.[1][2][3] For
instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary information
encoded in genes, which can be transmitted to future generations. Another major theme
is evolution, which explains the unity and diversity of life.[1][2][3] Energy processing is also
important to life as it allows organisms to move, grow, and reproduce.[1][2][3] Finally, all
organisms are able to regulate their own internal environments.[1][2][3][4][5]
Biologists are able to study life at multiple levels of organization,[1] from the molecular
biology of a cell to the anatomy and physiology of plants and animals, and evolution of
populations.[1][6] Hence, there are multiple subdisciplines within biology, each defined by
the nature of their research questions and the tools that they use.[7][8][9] Like other
scientists, biologists use the scientific method to make observations, pose questions,
generate hypotheses, perform experiments, and form conclusions about the world
around them.[1]
Life on Earth, which emerged more than 3.7 billion years ago,[10] is immensely diverse.
Biologists have sought to study and classify the various forms of life,
from prokaryotic organisms such as archaea and bacteria to eukaryotic organisms such
as protists, fungi, plants, and animals. These various organisms contribute to
the biodiversity of an ecosystem, where they play specialized roles in
the cycling of nutrients and energy through their biophysical environment.
History
Main article: History of biology
Diagram of a fly from Robert Hooke's innovative Micrographia, 1665

The earliest of roots of science, which included medicine, can be traced to ancient
Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3000 to 1200 BCE.[11][12] Their contributions shaped
ancient Greek natural philosophy.[13][11][12][14][15] Ancient Greek philosophers such
as Aristotle (384–322 BCE) contributed extensively to the development of biological
knowledge. He explored biological causation and the diversity of life. His
successor, Theophrastus, began the scientific study of plants.[16] Scholars of
the medieval Islamic world who wrote on biology included al-Jahiz (781–869), Al-
Dīnawarī (828–896), who wrote on botany,[17] and Rhazes (865–925) who wrote
on anatomy and physiology. Medicine was especially well studied by Islamic
scholars working in Greek philosopher traditions, while natural history drew heavily on
Aristotelian thought.
Biology began to quickly develop with Anton van Leeuwenhoek's dramatic improvement
of the microscope. It was then that scholars discovered spermatozoa,
bacteria, infusoria and the diversity of microscopic life. Investigations by Jan
Swammerdam led to new interest in entomology and helped to develop techniques of
microscopic dissection and staining.[18] Advances in microscopy had a profound impact
on biological thinking. In the early 19th century, biologists pointed to the central
importance of the cell. In 1838, Schleiden and Schwann began promoting the now
universal ideas that (1) the basic unit of organisms is the cell and (2) that individual cells
have all the characteristics of life, although they opposed the idea that (3) all cells come
from the division of other cells, continuing to support spontaneous generation.
However, Robert Remak and Rudolf Virchow were able to reify the third tenet, and by
the 1860s most biologists accepted all three tenets which consolidated into cell theory.[19]
[20]
Meanwhile, taxonomy and classification became the focus of natural historians. Carl
Linnaeus published a basic taxonomy for the natural world in 1735, and in the 1750s
introduced scientific names for all his species.[21] Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de
Buffon, treated species as artificial categories and living forms as malleable—even
suggesting the possibility of common descent.[22]
In 1842, Charles Darwin penned his first sketch of On the Origin of

Species.[23]
Serious evolutionary thinking originated with the works of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who
presented a coherent theory of evolution.[24] The British naturalist Charles Darwin,
combining the biogeographical approach of Humboldt, the uniformitarian geology
of Lyell, Malthus's writings on population growth, and his own morphological expertise
and extensive natural observations, forged a more successful evolutionary theory based
on natural selection; similar reasoning and evidence led Alfred Russel Wallace to
independently reach the same conclusions.[25][26]
The basis for modern genetics began with the work of Gregor Mendel in 1865.[27] This
outlined the principles of biological inheritance.[28] However, the significance of his work
was not realized until the early 20th century when evolution became a unified theory as
the modern synthesis reconciled Darwinian evolution with classical genetics.[29] In the
1940s and early 1950s, a series of experiments by Alfred Hershey and Martha
Chase pointed to DNA as the component of chromosomes that held the trait-carrying
units that had become known as genes. A focus on new kinds of model organisms such
as viruses and bacteria, along with the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA
by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, marked the transition to the era
of molecular genetics. From the 1950s onwards, biology has been vastly extended in
the molecular domain. The genetic code was cracked by Har Gobind Khorana, Robert
W. Holley and Marshall Warren Nirenberg after DNA was understood to contain codons.
The Human Genome Project was launched in 1990 to map the human genome.[30]

Biology

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Biology is the scientific study of life.

[1][2][3] It is a natural science with a broad scope but

Diagram of a fly from Robert Hooke's innovative Micrographia, 1665

In 1842, Charles Darwin penned his first sketch of On the Origin of

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